Growth

A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived

Karen DeBonis
Apprentice House Press ($19.99)

In her memoir Growth: A Mother, Her Son, and the Brain Tumor They Survived, Karen DeBonis draws upon the various meanings of the word. When a mysterious set of behaviors—lack of focus, odd tics, and declining motor-skills—sprout up in her son Matthew, she must confront her people-pleasing nature and develop the assertiveness required to raise a special needs child in a broken healthcare system. As DeBonis registers the maddening helplessness of searching for what ails her firstborn, we spin with her through the revolving door of mother-shaming doctors, false diagnoses, ineffective treatment plans, and the well-meaning concern of friends and family.

DeBonis parents with the extreme patience of a Buddha, while peeling back the curtain on darker thoughts and feelings: her fear of making waves, her rage and its occasional outbursts, her coping mechanism of binge eating. Growth will especially speak to parents of special needs/chronically ill children, but it is, at its core, a woman’s story; many women will recognize themselves in the author’s struggle with her social programming to be “good,” underneath which—in her case—is genuine compassion. As Matthew’s illness isolates them both from friends and community, she writes, “I ached for his aloneness, knowing intimately the awfulness of it.”

Growth also holds up a mirror to the way patriarchal values operate in traditional marriages. DeBonis’s husband Michael is a loving partner and parent, but the author is often coaxing him into a greater level of concern and action on Matthew’s behalf. When they finally discover the cause of their son’s bizarre symptoms—the brain tumor of the subtitle—DeBonis criticizes herself for not working harder to find answers, but Michael wonders, “How did I not see it?” It is a question we’ve been wondering alongside him, and it validates DeBonis’s long held frustration of carrying the larger share of emotional labor.

DeBonis’s grounded perspective on personal growth helps readers see their own limitations with compassion. Directly after receiving the correct diagnoses, she experiences a seismic transformation when a new part of her she calls She-Bear emerges: “The boundaries of my body were unable to contain the force, so my legs and arms and head stretched and expanded to gigantic proportions. It wasn’t imagined. It was palpable in every cell of my growing body.” It’s one of those life-changing moments, and yet, DeBonis is honest about its fleeting nature: “My foray into assertiveness . . . turned out to be brief and subdued. My skills had not been honed for the long haul.”

In one particularly self-revealing chapter, “My Real, Messy Story,” DeBonis asks an existential question familiar to anyone who’s withstood long periods of crisis: “How does one reconcile such extremes of feeling, thinking and believing?” We find answers in the book’s main theme of self-acceptance. After what should have been life-changing surgery, Matthew’s handicaps do not vanish, and in order to thrive as an independent adult, he must finally come to terms with his disability and accept help from a government jobs program. DeBonis shares with us what she wishes she’d had the courage to say to the pediatrician who initially and repeatedly dismissed her concerns. This is the only time we lose an intimate connection with her, as she asks us to join her in self-recrimination. But at the chapter’s end, DeBonis offers forgiveness for her own—and by extension, our—shortcomings: “the baby steps I took were leaps of great distance.”

With exquisite vulnerability and awareness of interior dynamics, Growth anchors its suspense in a loving family who plays well, fights with and for each other, and ultimately grows together. Towards the end, the author’s parents exhibit polite passivity when a healthcare agency cancels an important appointment for her ailing mother. DeBonis finds their complacency—the very trait that shaped her good girl persona—unacceptable, and, in She Bear manner, swiftly and effectively advocates on their behalf. In this regard, Matthew’s tumor has spurred real change; readers would do well to conclude that though personal evolution can’t be rushed, it is entirely possible.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Book Review, Nonfiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

How to See

Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art

David Salle
Originally published by W.W. Norton & Company (2016)

This review is part of A Look Back, a series across Rain Taxi’s print and online editions that reflects on older books that continue to resonate.

by Josh Steinbauer

Art writing has been a problem in the art world for decades. Beyond criticism, even the didactic texts posted on gallery and museum walls are so routinely convoluted that the style of writing has become known as “International Art English.” The art writing of David Salle, however, lands differently, not because it’s anti-institutional—he’s a darling of the institution—but because he simply refuses to let the art he’s passionate about fall prey to dissertation-ese. Take this description from the tribute to his former teacher John Baldessari:

It speaks to the amazingly resilient desire to make art, which is to say, to forge unlikely connections between things, to access unexpected emotional currents, to make poetry, to make a new meaning or at least shake off the old one.

Salle’s contagious enthusiasm and commitment to plain language make his How to See a pleasure to read. None of the essays in this collection wade into solipsistic debates about what is and isn’t art (have designations like non-objectivism or post-structuralism ever wrung more meaning out of a work?), and all of them show that art writing can be more interesting and accessible than academic analysis.

Intriguingly, Salle links the rise of insufferable art speak to the ascension of Conceptual Art and the art world’s shifted attention toward artists’ intentions: “In my view, intentionality is not just overrated; it puts the cart so far out in front that the horse, sensing futility, gives up and lies down in the street.” Indeed, for decades now, the focus has been on where the artist wanted to go (which demands explication) rather than where they actually went (which is right in front of us).

Salle, on the other hand, does away with hubristic artist statements and PR ambiguities, and devotes more space to how artists talk about art among themselves. As he stated in a 2016 PBS NewsHour interview: “Art is something someone made. It’s a product of human endeavor. As such, it’s not that diﬀerent from having a conversation with someone.”^[1] He doesn’t make any attempts at professional distance (he is more than happy to interview his friends) and is enjoyably catty about it: “In fact, there are really only three types of conversation among artists: complaining about critics, bashing other artists, and real estate.”

Of course, a criticism to be leveled against celebrating one’s own network (particularly for a white guy from the 1980s art world) is that it doesn’t make for much diversity. How to See features the usual suspects in a range from eggshell to alabaster—Lichtenstein, Acconci, Polke, Stella, Koons, et al. But fixing a lack of diversity in the art world isn’t Salle’s project here. His purpose in How To See is a reverential one, as he explained in a 2016 interview in Interview: “I find it so amazing and so full of wonder when something is good. I do feel like we should celebrate it rather than worry about whether it’s on the right side of history.”^[2]

This insistent positivity might seem pretty basic, but for art criticism it’s worth applauding—some of the most esteemed critics (even Pulitzer Prize winners) too gleefully punch down. Granted, everyone enjoys the occasional evisceration of a Goliath or the flushed cheeks of an emperor, but bad reviews are ultimately junk food. Salle knows that a critic’s job is to point you to the best work they can find and start a conversation.

“Portrait of a Book Report: David Salle” Josh Steinbauer 2023. Art courtesy of the reviewer, one in a series of renditions of writers alongside their words featured on his Instagram (@joshsteinbauer).

“It seems just yesterday I was an enfant terrible, an outsider knocking on the door of the house of art. I don’t remember being invited inside. Nevertheless, time passes. Now I’m up here.” This is how Salle begins “Art Is Not A Popularity Contest,” his commencement speech delivered at the New York Academy of Art and tucked into this book at the end. Time has indeed passed—Salle is a long way from his birthplace in an “overgrown cow town”^[3] in Oklahoma, and his enfant terrible days at the legendary Cal Arts in the ’70s have receded like a hairline—but “up here” is the inside of museum collections all over the world.

This trajectory, of course, has enormous consequences for Salle’s career as an art critic, since he has come to know many of the others inside as well. And the visual arts have notorious walls separating insiders and outsiders, but for a guy who’s already in the history books, he isn’t caught polishing his all-access pass. Instead, he uses that very access to push past stuffy halls and curatorial pretensions and drop us into more relaxed reflection and chatter among friends. As intentions go, Salle doesn’t work too hard at bringing down the art world’s walls, but How To See props open a window for those inner conversations to float out.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/one-painter-understanding-art-simple-looking
[2] https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/david-salle-1
[3] https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/its-not-nice-to-kick-the-dead-but-in-this-one-case-i-dont-really-care-an-hour-with-david-salle-4090/

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Feature

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Thinking Root

The Poetry of Earliest Greek Philosophy

Translated by Dan Beachy-Quick
Milkweed Editions ($18)

by John Bradley

There’s something about the writing of the ancient Greeks that calls out to the present like a mythical siren; Kenneth Rexroth, Dudley Fitts, Mary Barnard, and Anne Carson are a few of the translators who have heard this siren call. Dan Beachy-Quick is another, as shown by his recent translations of Sappho (Wind-Mountain-Oak, Tupelo Press, 2023) and sixth-century BCE Greek poets (Stone-Garland, Milkweed Editions, 2020). Now, with The Thinking Root, he offers skillful translations of some early Greek philosophers: Heraclitus, Thales, Empedocles, and five others.

Beachy-Quick’s sensitive translations use fresh language to cast new light on the words of these early thinkers. Before discussing his translations, though, it’s necessary to consider his approach to these texts, which he shares in an introduction:

The hope of this small volume of translations is to offer some experience of what it might be to think as these thinkers thought. To do so means the translation takes an unusual path. Sensing that the standard scholarly presentation that cites the sources in which the texts are found acts mostly as a scaffolding that traces a thinking while also obscuring it, I decided to see what would happen if these attributions were removed, if we had to encounter these words as one might find a broken shard in a field, and then another, and again, knowing somehow they fit together into a vessel entire, but not knowing how to assemble it, not knowing if all the parts have been found, or even if all the shards belong to the same pot.

While the translation of Greek fragments is a challenge for any translator, Beachy-Quick’s approach seeks to heighten the intensity of this challenge rather than tame it with scholarly “scaffolding.” Here are some texts by Anaxagoras that possibly gain by Beachy-Quick’s approach, where we encounter the writing as isolated shards. Note how strange and at the same time familiar they sound, as if the pre-Socratic philosopher were also a quantum physicist and Zen master rolled into one:

What you see is a vision of what cannot be seen.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Of the small there is no smallest, but smaller yet always exists (for what is is not not to be).

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

All other things share some inner portion, but the Mind is boundless and self-ruling and joined to no other substance, but only it is alone—alone in itself.

Many early Greek philosophers often wrote in an aphoristic style, perhaps to better express the paradoxical nature of the universe. Heraclitus in particular enjoyed the abrupt energy of the aphorism:

The road up and the road down are one road.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In hell souls smell.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Asses prefer shit mixed with straw to gold.

Empedocles could sound like a doctor who writes poetry on the side:

The heart, nurtured in the blood’s echoing ocean,
is where in humans what is best called thought is—
for the blood around the human heart is thought.

Some Greek thinkers favored the question and response, that most basic form of conveying complex thought. This exchange by Thales could be a passage from one of the famous Taoist thinkers, Lao-Tzu or Chuang-Tzu:

“Death,” he said, “is no different than life.” “If so,” someone said, “why don’t you die?” “Because there is no difference,” he said.

Perhaps the most enigmatic text in The Thinking Root comes from Heraclitus and consists of only three words: “I sought myself.” In his introduction to Heraclitus, Beachy-Quick tells us that this phrase could be translated as “I searched myself. I searched for myself. I searched through myself.” What a rich and mysterious statement. Beachy-Quick goes on to note how this complexity of seeking bears on his approach to translation: “What each translation reveals isn’t a fact but a thoughtful suspicion.” No wonder he’s such a good translator—there’s humility and honesty expressed here.

One hopes that Beachy-Quick will offer more of his “thoughtful suspicions” of ancient Greek texts in future, as The Thinking Root offers so much to ponder and savor. Here’s one last offering, this one by Empedocles: “Blessed, who gains the gold mine of a mind god-given— / wretched, who cares most for dark doctrines about the gods.” A gold mine is an apt metaphor for how Beachy-Quick treats the writing of these early Greek philosophers, and his sense of wonder and respect for it is contagious.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Book Review, Mixed Genre Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Poetry Detonates Dualism: An Interview with Martine Bellen

by Chris Stroffolino

Martine Bellen has been a quiet force in poetry for over two decades. Her second book, Tales of Murasaki (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Rosmarie Waldrop, and acclaimed collections from Copper Canyon and other small presses have followed; in 2015 Spuyten Duyvil released This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems. A contributing editor for Conjunctions, Bellen also has composed libretti for three operas, and her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies, most recently in the 2023 volume of The Best American Poetry.

Elizabeth Robinson writes that the poems in Bellen’s latest collection, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, $21.95), “are capable of the most agile swerves, demonstrating that a serious inquiry can sail on music and play, through myth and dream: here are the malleable, chewy realms of metamorphosis.” Fascinated by these agile swerves, I brought some of Bellen’s poems into the creative writing class I teach, and I am grateful to my students for a spirited discussion—some of their insights and questions, in fact, are incorporated into the following interview.

Chris Stroffolino: I want to begin with a comment you made in a recent interview with Indran Amirthanayagam, that you “work more from the surreal than from myth.” I feel the first poem in An Anatomy of Curiosity, “Bad Times at the El Royale,” works through a Hollywood mythology, wending beyond that and crescendoing to a dream sphere:

You and I are in the body bag, sleeping beside
a volcano that vibrates and reaches up us
like a fist through a throat, signaling
to a lifeguard to swim across ages
and currents, through celestial meridians,
toward our swirling sound bridge,
beautiful mind, plenary weave, a coat of every note.

While the sinuous flowing music is transporting, I am also struck by the peril, and I wonder if the prayer to the lifeguard is answered. Do you want to say anything more about myth and surrealism in this poem, or elsewhere in your work?

Martine Bellen: A number of things drew me to the movie Bad Times at the El Royale. In it, nothing is what it seems and no one is who they say they are, so some of the poem is about washing away who we pretend to be or think we are. Because of this, detergents and washing machines play a part, though as you suggest, the last section of the poem turns menacing and violent—the soundtrack switches. This happens to me often in dreams; suddenly, the scene pivots and I’m alone and have lost my ability to speak. So in An Anatomy of Curiosity, the loss of voice that can happen when you’re in danger and can’t call out for help is a strand woven into the design. One can have the experience of being unable to reach the bridge between self and others.

What I meant in the conversation with Indran is that myths, being ancient, shared belief systems, have bridges and gates, and my poems roam the mythic landscape while quilting (in the surrealist sense of juxtaposition) “our swirling sound bridge, / beautiful mind, plenary weave, a coat of every note.”

CS: As I reread the poem in light of your response, I notice “bridges” can be a noun (common and proper, since Jeff Bridges is in the film) and a verb, and I feel the gated community of Bill Gates as well—your imagining’s sudsy synesthesia indeed washes the language. I also love that you bring your Zen Buddhist practice into this capacious trans-denominational quilting while you roam; the rhythmic alliterative flow of variations on the word “prayer” in “Deafening Prayer” is an especially joyful example. How did this come about?

MB: I started “Deafening Prayer” around Election Day, when a radio announcer said that voting is praying. I hadn’t thought of voting that way before, but it’s so true: We send out a petition for who we wish will win the race in the same way we pray for anything we want. Then I asked myself, What isn’t praying?—I realized that everything is a prayer. From there, a fragmented inverted list poem commenced.

Also, since you mention both Bill Gates and Buddhism: While working on this book, I was sitting with koans, those riddles/questions in Zen practice that a meditator focuses on (a popular koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”). Koans are used to free one from dualistic thinking, the idea being that the experiential is unimpeded by the limits of language, but when we attempt to describe experience in language, we crash onto dualistic Earth.

Poetry is, I think, a type of language that can detonate dualism. And Zen priests and practitioners have a long history of writing poetry. In fact, anthologies of koans are structured with the koan, a short commentary, and finally a capping poem, which is the experiential insight. Most of the koans I was sitting with when working on An Anatomy of Curiosity are from The Gateless Gate, a collection of forty-eight koans compiled in the 13th century; when meditating, “gates” or barriers are passed through and the meditator moves on to the next one. So throughout An Anatomy of Curiosity, I have included various “gates” (though not Bill)—for instance, in “Myth of the Bluebeard-ed Bluebird” I write, “‘Going up,’ elevator operator chimes as he closes one gate” (remember old-school elevator gates?) and in “Monkey and Spirit Bird Triptych,” “It’s all about where you drop the garden gate” (that’s Miles Davis’s music space). So yes—bridges and gates are the infrastructure of some of the poems, connecting our island delusion.

CS: I do remember those elevators, and I definitely see your gates and bridges working in many ways to pass through barriers of dualistic thinking and create connections. In this light, I’d like to look at “Myth of the Bluebeard-ed Bluebird” with you in more depth:

            “Going up,” elevator operator chimes as he closes one gate.
“Going down,” is chanted at the far end of the elevator bank,
                                    the river bank,
                                                banks of earth sloping
from land to sea, from water wake
to streams of sleep
                                    from limbs to fins.

This short stanza brings so much into play: in the first line we sense the confinement of the elevator (symbol of progress, the ego at the wheel?), though the second line feels like a yin to its yang, and taken together with the first can possibly do “koan work”; its passive voice and its contrast of chant with chime suggests to me that “what goes up must come down” but also implies an echoing. Then the next five lines dance away from the confinement of the “banks,” taking on a chthonic (rather than economic) connotation. The language also suggests multi-directional transport, both “up” and “down” stream, as if a “gateless gate,” or at least a wider sense of subjectivity, emerges. The poem continues:

In this myth, you want nothing more
than to land in a fully stocked big-box stationary store,
but the mall is poorly lit, and portals lead to floors
of canopied woods before deforestation and paper mills.

At first, this desiring “you” (inside the elevator that’s become a portal) seems disappointed or anxious, implying perhaps the death of our civilization, but also the loss of time-space coordinates—there’s no stationary place to land—but, in the next stanza, there’s an opening as myths mingle:

Nymphs flaunt their good fortune on escalators to faux fountains,
satyrs squeeze into try-on rooms,
whispering oaks, in maquillage, with roots of skulls and spine.

You cap it off with a shorter-lined lyric that, among other things, has me thinking about “countenance”:

The structure’s columns
mirrored
sartorial
wear
your countenance
bear
the ceiling
conceal the celestial, the cerulean.

To sum up: I wonder if this poem is structured like the koan anthologies you mentioned: koan, commentary, and then the capping “experiential insight.”

MB: Let me backtrack a bit to your reading of the lines

the river bank,
banks of earth sloping
from land to sea, from water wake
to streams of sleep
from limbs to fins.

as multi-directional transport—I love your sense of how the words interconnect and sound. I was also attempting to wake up the positive devolution we can experience as we fall back on our full selves, shelves of selves (folded in The Gap) in which there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous—from limbs to fins, it’s all there.

Additionally, I’m very fond of your reading of the elevator as portal or time transport to our department store, a shared, common, ridiculous, fairy tale space in which it’s so easy to get lost (and is indeed never stationary). I believe those who design department stores intend for us to lose ourselves—personally, I have a hard time breathing when I’m in one. The poem “Mother Hubbard” also wends its way through a department store. And again, one gets lost.

CS: It’s interesting that both the poems you mentioned that include gates appear in the final section of the book: “Dream-Mares, Glue Traps, and Other Dark Matter.” When reading that title, it’s hard not to think of horses being made into glue as well as bridges becoming walls. What can you tell us about this section of An Anatomy of Curiosity?

MB: The book’s third section includes hauntings and threats. Readers might know a ’60s TV show called Lost in Space in which the family robot, when confronted with potential peril, would call out “Danger, Will Robinson!” The poems in “Dream-Mares, Glue Traps, and Other Dark Matter” don’t all have present dangers, but there is always something lurking—and yes, in these poems, horse glue might mucilage the broken lines. For example, in “Monkey and Spirit Bird Triptych,” spry spirit birds turn rogue and “suck out Monkey’s lifesaver hole”; in “Confession,” poetry itself devolves into protolanguage, and in the absence of language, transforms into a kiss—though the kiss is the one that revives Psyche.

CS: What you call “positive devolution” abounds in “Confession,” a virtuoso seven-page meta-poem in which I find, to borrow another of your phrases, “nothing lacking and nothing superfluous.” I’m especially amazed by its shape and narrative structure as it wends its way from crisis to quest to crisis to prayer to an encounter with the goddess Nyx before that “prodigal // Kiss.” Can you say anything more about the structure?

MB: Thanks, I’m so pleased you experienced that poem as tight and full also, as the tone is more conversational than most of my poetry. I tend not to write narrative poems, and not to write short-lined poems that proceed straight down a page, so I was allowing myself to explore a new field when writing this. Although the protagonist of the poem, Poem, is said to be losing it—and maybe in these dark days we’re living through, poetry is thought to have lost it—its breath is sustained, and even after the kiss, the breath doesn’t end with a period (nor does the poem). The short enjambed lines are an homage to sustained breath.

CS: I love the way you harmonize narrative and lyric impulses. On one hand, the reader gets empathetically involved with the drama of the inadequate, lost poem—searching for subject matter to give it direction so it can become a sacrificial victim in Nyx’s ritual—it’s a fructifying meta-myth with suspense and foreshadowing. On the other hand, the sustained breath of the short lines from the beginning (even in polysyllabic phrases like, “a born zigzagger, / topographically agnostic”) belies the narrative, or presages it dying into the lyric now.

MB: The lyric impulse, which is the final skeletal thread, definitely outlives the narrative one. Close to the end of the poem, as you note, everything devolves. To signal the loss of the narrative, there’s a quick sketch of the Canova sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss—which my husband, James Graham, kindly drew—that’s referenced in the poem.

CS: This is a brilliant and beautiful collaboration with your husband. In his sketch of the sculpture, Cupid’s face and body do not seem to be as defined as Psyche’s, which seems more muscular and active in the moment of embrace, but his wings evoke pillars of rope. Earlier in the poem, you had introduced the sculpture as a “wingéd marble man / revealed before a beauty / spiked into deathlike sleep.” At first, I had no idea this “beauty” was meant to be Psyche. Is the sketch meant to enhance the verbal description of the sculpture?

MB: I refer to Psyche as “beauty” since Psyche’s troubles arise because of her beauty. It’s great you see Psyche as active, as she is a journeyer in all her states; nevertheless, at this very moment Canova captures, Psyche is frozen because her curiosity, her inability to resist temptation, has gotten the best of her, yet again. The word “spiked” suspends the action as the last line of the stanza—that word is especially nuanced, waiting for viewers, listeners, readers to awaken and endow animation on Psyche, for Poem is nothing without its audience.

CS: Yes, there’s so much in these three lines, even the connotations of “spiked” from drunkenness to drug needles to violence—it’s as if, in order to revive Psyche, James’s sketch is killing the personified poem (or at least its narrative).

MB: Killing or freeing. When we’re freed from our stories, Psyche is finally immortal.

Once the poem lets loose its narrative, it begins to wind down, the wind and breath set free:

in the poem
in the palace
with its storehouse
of candelabras
and crystal vases

is where all our pictures and sounds are stockpiled, from our lifetimes and perhaps also the karma of our ancestors and relatives, and even miscellanea from the gothic castle/landscape of Coleridge’s “Christabel.”

CS: Gothic, yes, as Nyx provides the necessary atmosphere, amniotic fluid for this poem in which miscellanea can become:

giant tigresses
romping through
narrow
atriums
into a ventricle of the heart

Although Psyche and Cupid are not as foregrounded in “Confession” as Nyx is, but more in the wings (as it were), they take center stage in the following poem, “An Anatomy of Curiosity.”

MB: The story of Cupid and Psyche is one I have been drawn to from a young age, and with “Confession” and “An Anatomy of Curiosity,” I wanted to get inside the pleasure of that story. I loved the intimacy of Robert Duncan’s writing on Cupid and Psyche in The H.D. Book and, like him, I wanted to extend my experience with it. I’ve always thought of it as a hybrid fairytale/myth, but I’m not sure where or how I first heard the story; it was first written down by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, but I surely didn’t read that rendition until college. What caught me is how Psyche is reminded to repress her curiosity, and when she doesn’t, the story gets especially exciting: she spills wax on her beautiful lover, flies too close to the sun.

CS: I love the way you introduce the myth in Chapter One of “An Anatomy of Curiosity,” while Chapter Two brings into play a more modern myth, as Psyche becomes an object of the sublimated curiosity of “scientific analysis.” The contrast between narrative and sustained breath you noted in “Confession” is similar to that of the figures of the Detective and Psychic here, as you move beyond antithesis to a syncretic joining of the discourse of Freudian “drives” with mythopoesis: “Hemispheres of land beneath a surface of chaos, Chronos.”

MB: The dualities we discussed earlier are echoed in “An Anatomy of Curiosity.” In Chapter Two, the deducing Detective (and don’t forget Oedipus Rex, which inspired Freud, is maybe our first detective story, or at least an early one) and Psyche/Psychic/Soul are dichotomous spirits in that mysterious “black box of the brain,” and we know Psyche and Pandora couldn’t resist boxes.

CS: And in Chapter Seven, as “questions arise from the stem of the body” and Psyche lights the candle that scares Desire away, language becomes as musical as the unheard music it’s ostensibly about:

Think of a dream seamstress, a songster, a siren,
            A shore breeze with wavy tresses
       Bowling out the beaks of pipers,
                 The hollow low notes that dip on the concave clavicle,
                                                            Wending viola strings.
       Think of a pattern cutter, a dreamstress,
                              Tree witness and earlobe globes
Nothing permitted, permanent
The writhen octopus
Or octave written in wind.

Meanwhile, I wonder about the connotations, the tone, of “Nothing permitted, permanent.” At first, I feel sadness and despair here, but then I sense a double meaning of “nothing” as a presence, as if the voice is not merely lamenting but also signaling and singing the immortality of Psyche, or at least celebrating music freed from the page, even if it’s transient and unpermitted—the sublime gospel of the blues. It also recalls the first line of the book: “I left my permission slip in a past.” Forever changes, permission slips (as if it’s revealed to be merely administrative). Was this Da Capo movement intentional when considering the structure of the book? Can the book’s last line, “Off an eyeblink in a flame wink” be a koan?

MB: Those words “Off an eyeblink in a flame wink” appear at the end of the book’s final poem, which is printed in German (I wrote the poem in English and Hans Jürgen Balmes translated it into German). So if one were dreaming through this life and this book, and this dream is in a language which one sometimes understands and sometimes doesn’t, and one hears/reads Flamme winkt der Luft and then in a flame wink, one might find oneself suspended between language, in the marvelous still, in the pause of poetry.

Interview

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The House on Via Gemito

Domenico Starnone
Translated by Oonagh Stransky
Europa Editions ($27)

by William Braun

Domenico Starnone’s previously translated novels are psychological studies of repressed father-figures that move at thriller-like speed. In Trust (Europa Editions, 2021), for example, Pietro plays a model father and husband, but only because an ex-girlfriend threatens to reveal an incriminating secret. Trick (Europa Editions, 2018), alternatively, is about a grandfather who is the antithesis of grandfatherly: Daniele, a self-obsessed artist who resents his grandson.

The House on Via Gemito covers similar material, though it is longer and looser than those previous books, and its structure is more triptych than thriller. Supposedly fiction, the novel focuses on a writer named Dominico who is haunted by the “energetic cascade” of his father Federico’s lies, tall tales, and misogynistic slurs. Federico works for the railroad but believes he’s an artistic genius whose “destiny” is continually sabotaged by various “shitheads” and “ball busters”; these include other painters, art critics, and, most significantly, Domenico’s mother, Rusinè. (Starnone’s real-life father, also named Federico, was a minor post-war Italian painter.)

In the first section, “The Peacock,” Domenico follows his younger self, aged four or five, as he walks down a hallway to get his father’s cigarettes. Behind him, his father abuses his mother, “accusing her about the money” and “offending [her] relatives.” This recollection, however, is far from linear; Domenico remembers other incidents at almost every step. In one, his father outsmarts railroad officials to secure company housing for his family. In another, his father boasts about the “great talents” that made him a successful set designer after World War II, praised by American GIs and Hollywood starlets. Yet Domenico keeps returning to that hallway, a memory so urgent and painful that some fifty years later, he still slips into the present tense: “I just heard [my father] yell … and it gave me a start; he’s yelling now; he’s about to yell.”

The centerpiece of Via Gemito is its second section, “The Boy Pouring Water.” Domenico—aged maybe ten—poses for his father, kneeling “in pain” and pretending to pour water into a construction worker’s cup. Meanwhile, his father continues “to paint and talk about himself.” (A detail from the author’s real-life father’s painting, “The Drinkers,” appears on the novel’s dust jacket.) Federico’s family, in other words, pays the price for Federico’s artistic narcissism. Domenico certainly does: In this memory, as in many others, he would rather suffer than “give [his father] any reasons for blaming” him. But also Rusinè: Federico makes her “live … without any great expressions of joy,” and as the novel’s third and final section shows, she downplays a major illness until it’s too late.

Bitterness and futility, not fame and glory, become Federico’s legacies. In one of his frequent asides, Domenico looks at some of his father’s paintings of Rusinè and her family and thinks:

While my memories of them may have been dull, they were still more intense than what the reliable seismograph of art had been able to register … Much more sensitive tools and sophisticated techniques are needed to capture that cluster of voices, gestures, pulsations, instance of illness and health, hiccups, belly laughs, and groans of pain that we conventionally refer to as individual.

Here Domenico doesn’t just question whether his father’s achievements are worth the damage he caused, he questions the very idea of mimetic art—that it captures the reality of physical presence. “I was trying to understand how life decays when we’re overpowered by an obsession for results,” Domenico concludes.

Of course, Starnone does not reject art or craft; anyone who has read his previous novels knows they’re a testament to plot and sentence. Still, as translated by Oonagh Stransky (who has translated Italian works by authors ranging from Eugenio Montale to Pope Francis), The House on Via Gemito serves to show his English readership how much broader his talent is. A memento mori of sorts, the book is a reminder that most of us will only be remembered by how we treated those near to us, and that “living and thinking matter [are] the only set design worth loving.”

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Fiction Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Unreal City

Mike Lala
Tupelo Press ($21.95)

by Peter Myers

“I want a holophrase,” declares Hope Mirrlees—a single word to denote a whole complex of ideas. Thus begins Paris: A Poem, a six-hundred-line eruption of avant-gardism now regarded as a modernist classic. Her holophrase could well be the title itself: “Paris,” in 1920, signified both a classicism on its deathbed and a frenetic, whiplash present, a free-fall into a future as garish and unassimilable as the city’s boulevards, street vendors, and neon lights. Mirrlees’s poem of urban flânerie was an attempt to capture centuries of history and culture (read: barbarism) piled atop each other, chaotically signifying the arrival of a new era and a new relation to time.

The Unreal City, Mike Lala’s second poetry collection, reprises Mirrlees’s method but swaps 1920’s Paris for present-day New York City. While The Unreal City remains entangled with the modernist era—the title alludes to The Waste Land, a poem published, it’s worth noting, three years after Paris—its preoccupations are decidedly contemporary. For Lala, the city is ground zero for both the violence of history’s erasure and the deluge of its return; it’s where social antagonisms stare each other down in “the maculate, moth-riddled / sodium-vapor street-lamp light.”

Lala’s poetic method is primarily one of depiction. The collection’s opening poem, “My Nudes,” is ekphrastic, a montage of art-historical bodies. But Lala tweaks the formula by adjoining multiple subjects to a single first-person pronoun; the boundaries between the nudes, and between art and audience, are blurred from the start. Thus we’re introduced to one of the book’s central preoccupations: the challenge of separating our own outlines from the historical forces that shape them.

In subsequent poems, the speaker adopts a posture akin to Mirrlees’s urban flaneur, bearing witness to a world-destroying appetite for wealth as they wander a maze of asphalt and blue-grey glass. “Elizabeth Street” is a catalogue of storefronts that doubles as lifestyle porn, a litany of all that’s found “on Liz / street of my patron-funded dreams.” A sampling: “Unis, Café Habana, Kit 228 and Steven Alan / Le Labo, Aesop, Clare V, Shott NYC, Me&Ro, / Albanese Rudolph, Emmett / McCarthy, Thomas Sires, then Todd Snyder.” Here Lala deftly navigates a tricky tonal strait. The fact that his speaker simultaneously craves everything his “patron-funded dreams” would grant him—the $50 soap, the $400 shirts—and finds those same “patrons” despicable registers not as a contradiction so much as a necessary resentment; the would-be patrons, after all, are the ones who made the world this way, engineered it to contort our desires into such monstrous shapes. Many of the storefronts Lala’s flaneur strolls past have long been closed, a testament to how these high-end stores and boutiques—a living index of the city’s transformation from a place where people live to a publicly-subsidized warehouse for excess capital—are no less safe from the market’s predations than the people who can barely afford to window-shop.

“Work,” a long poem of urban wandering and rumination, takes up the majority of The Unreal City’s pages. The poem pays explicit homage to Paris: Lala borrows Mirrlees’s opening line and recycles many of her formal experiments, including typographical jump cuts, unconventional text alignment, and the incorporation of found text. But whereas Mirrlees generally restricts her scavenging to her poem’s urban environs—storefronts and advertisements, overheard gossip—Lala quotes and interpolates from a litany of written sources, documented in the book’s copious endnotes. The poem’s most prominent source text, other than Paris, is Vergil’s Georgics, the Roman poet’s treatise on farm work and apiculture. Lala thus turns our attention toward a different relation to work, one which, from the approximate hell of our present, seems prudent, even virtuous. Here, the word work functions as Lala’s own holophrase, referring not just to labor, but to what comes of it—the work of art, say, shaped no less by the hands of the artist than by the forces which act on those hands.

Like The Unreal City’s shorter poems, the opening gesture of “Work” is to strafe the urban environment. Our flaneur-speaker notes rooftop cops, overhead jets, and, like Prufrock, his own footfalls on “certain half- / deserted streets.” But unlike Prufrock (or Eliot, for that matter), Lala’s speaker has a decidedly historical-materialist sensibility: “View down Wycoff; mist over spires. / The workmanship of these, of everything, is empire— / bodies, labor, and theft—a way of making money / in the blue alarm clock light, a holophrase.” Later, “Work” swerves from the metropole to the periphery, copping to the predatory extraction of land and labor that keeps the urban enterprise running:

You KNOW how it STARTS.
MONEY taught
human beings
to wrench up the SOIL with iron,
to hunt, fund, kill, till, drill, develop, and steal land from others.
NOW in resources EARTH is DEFICIENT
SWEAT & GREED
became
products
BREATH
of HISTORY.

“Work,” however, is far more than agitprop that pays mind to prosody (not that that would be so unwelcome). The elements of its composition—the formal debt to Mirrlees’s Paris; the interpolations of Eliot, Vergil, and others—become, as the poem unfolds, an elaboration of its argument. Lala takes as his epigraph a quote from Andreas Malm, noting that our current climate crisis isn’t the revenge of nature so much as “the revenge of historicity dressed in nature.” We are helpless against the past’s irruption into the present, even if the unreal city’s burnished surfaces, visual metaphors for the frictionless flow of capital, would lead us to think otherwise. Our present world cannot be disentangled from the regimes of violence and dispossession that built and sustain it. “Work,” in its own way, drags the past into plain sight; it’s the revenge of historicity dressed in language.

Cities, like poems, are at once bastions of unreality and a means to survive it; in its final pages, The Unreal City takes the shape of a directive to tip the balance of urban life toward the latter. It’s didactic, but in a way that rings true, animated by the conviction that it would be worthless to say it otherwise: “Death to the god of our owners. / Death of the shares of our holders. Death / to the futures that lead us toward death.” For Lala, our new futures must be built where it is we stand, “beneath the shade / of monoliths.”

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Volume 28, Number 4, Winter 2023 (#112)

To purchase issue #112 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

INTERVIEWS

Lynn Levin: Playthings of Chaos | interviewed by Carolyne Wright
Elizabeth Metzger: In Two Separate Rooms, Breathing | interviewed by Tiffany Troy
Marty Cain: Pastoral Politics | interviewed by J. B. Stone

FEATURES

If and Only If | by Scott F. Parker
A Personal View: The Writer as Publisher | by David Stromberg
A Look Back: Bright Lights, Big City | by Neal Lipschutz
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan

Plus cover art by John Schuerman

NONFICTION REVIEWS

FICTION REVIEWS

POETRY REVIEWS

MIXED GENRE REVIEWS

Poets on the Road | Maureen Owen and Barbara Henning | by Kit Robinson
Poetechnics / Poetécnicas: Designs from the New World | Yaxkin Melchy
| by kathy wu

COMICS REVIEWS

My Picture Diary | Fujiwara Maki | by Jeff Alford

To purchase issue #112 using Paypal, click here.
To become a member and get quarterly issues of Rain Taxi delivered to your door, click here.

John Schuerman

*Walk on Lake Hiawatha, Winter Solstice*, 2021

John Schuerman is a self-taught artist and independent curator. His artwork reflects his deep interest in nature both human and nonhuman. His aesthetic style and social consciousness formed as he grew up on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin. Schuerman is an environmental, and documentary artist, exploring the physical, social, and psychic landscapes through drawing, video, photography, and walking-based art forms. His artwork has been presented in numerous exhibitions locally and nationally.

His curatorial projects engage viewers on today’s most pressing issues: empathy, human overpopulation, gun violence, money, time, nationalism, identity, conflict, environmentalism, and abuses of power. See more of his work online at www.schuermanfineart.com.

The Have-Not Mystery: An Interview with Jim Feast

by John Wisniewski

Jim Feast is the author of several collections of poetry and a founding member of the Unbearables, an action-oriented literary group based in New York City that has also produced several anthologies, including From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream (Autonomedia, 2017). Feast has edited seven books by Ralph Nader and worked with legendary publisher Barney Rosset on his autobiography. His new novel Karl Marx Private Eye (PM Press, $16.95) pairs a teenage Sherlock Holmes with Marx and his daughter Eleanor as they work to solve a series of murders. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife Nhi Chung.

John Wisniewski: Why did you want to write a mystery with Karl Marx as the main character?

Jim Feast: I can give the question two answers, since the book was done twice. In 1985, I finished a version of the book and gave it to agent Susan Protter, who tried unsuccessfully to interest publishers. Thirty years later, I rewrote the book from scratch.

I went to college in Chicago in the 1970s, which suggests why I first gravitated to making Marx a protagonist. In this time of campus upheaval over civil rights and the Vietnam War, many were consulting Marx and Bakunin for answers. Moreover, many of Chicago’s literary giants were political activists, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Upton Sinclair, if not outright Communist Party members, like Richard Wright and James T. Farrell. On top of that, my poet friend Jerome Sala introduced me into the Boho circle around painter Lady Bunny, which included activists like Eddie Balchowsky, who had lost an arm in the Spanish Civil War and kept alive memories of previous anti-rightist battles.

My wife, Nhi Chung, and I agreed that after we quit working, we would finish long-shelved literary projects. Once retirement came, she wrote her memoir Among the Boat People, about her escape from Vietnam and how she eventually reconciled herself to the past. After her book was published, I told her, “Now I’ll write my Vietnam novel.”

That’s only metaphorically true, in the sense that as her book deals with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, my mystery turns on the aftermath of the 1871 fall of the Paris Commune. The Commune occurred when there was a temporary working-class takeover of the city, which ended in a bloodbath. While Marx is labelled as one who believed in the inevitable coming of a Communist society, after the Paris defeat, he lost much of his optimism about historical progress and began to entertain Russian anarchist ideas—including, as his collaborator Engels put it, the idea that once the communist revolution was accomplished, humans might drop industrialization and return to societies practicing the mutual aid of the Russian mir.

JW: That’s all fascinating. And what inspired you to write this novel as a mystery?

JF: Having worked as a union organizer in Chicago and a housing organizer on New York City’s Lower East Side, I came to see the world as divided between haves and have-nots. I was attracted to American authors writing between the wars, such as Katherine Anne Porter and Claude McKay, who crafted a literature using the principles of the have-nots. While they wrote serious literature, I wondered whether their principles could be applied to genre fiction.

First principle: It is a sociological truism that the elite believe in individualism, in lone heroes like Phillip Marlowe, while the lower classes believe in collectivism, in the solidarity and group effort found, for instance, in unions, progressive churches, and feminist consciousness-raising circles. So, as I saw it, a have-not mystery must allow its detectives to be a collective—a bunch of characters conferring, making individual moves, and conferring again.

Second principle: Underclass literature must seize the themes, characters and plots presented by the elite and reconfigure them with mischievous vitality. To think of musical examples, between the wars, groups under the batons of Henderson, Ellington, and Chicago’s own Jimmie Noone took the stale tunes of Tin Pan Alley and remade them as vehicles for rollicking, free-spirited, collective improvisation. That’s something I think can also be worked through in genre literature.

In KMPE, I remake the figure of Sherlock Holmes, who in Doyle is an errant reactionary. As an example of this, remember that in the final Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, Holmes hunts down a secret society who come to England for revenge on a retired Pinkerton agent who exposed a wicked U.S. labor union, one Doyle modeled on the Molly McGuires. Here Holmes adopts the common (and self-serving) conservative idea that labor unions are nothing but conspiracies devised to fleece the workers and blackmail honest employers. Further, as the poststructuralist Catherine Belsey noted in Critical Practice (Routledge, 2002), Holmes has a major blind spot around women, who to him are indecipherable enigmas even his scientific method can’t fathom. Again, Holmes takes up the conservative stereotype of women as mysterious beings. So in my book, Holmes is reconfigured as a coltish youth who is led by Eleanor Marx to see the errors in the conservative stereotypes affixed to socialism and women.

JW: Who are some of your favorite authors and poets?

JF: The third principle of have-not genre fiction was developed to perfection by my favorite author, Chester Himes. In his mysteries, Himes shows that you find the solutions to crimes not by chasing individual villains but by examining social movements, which are the real motor forces of history. In Cotton Comes to Harlem (Putnam, 1965), for instance, there are two counterposed movements: a group led by Black minister Reverend Deke O’Malley calling for Black Harlemites to return to Africa, and the Back to the Southland group led by white Kentucky colonel Robert Calhoun, who urges the same people to return to cotton plantations where, he claims, conditions have miraculously improved. It is by delving into these movements that Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones break the case. In KMPE, solving the crime involves studying the Serbian independence movement and the actions of a group of displaced Communards.

Of course, you might ask: What’s the point of trying to refashion genres in a way that embodies have-not values? If as a working conjecture, we say that in the future the human world doesn’t disappear in an ecological collapse, the only alternative is mass democratization, which includes in its sweep family relations, cooperative workplaces and government. As Jane Addams puts it, “In a democratic society nothing can be achieved save through the masses of people.”

While such a society is being born, writers can contribute to it by making clear its guiding principles. This is a collective task in which multiple writers in multiple groupings are engaged. I might mention, for instance, those associated with PM Press, such as Michael Moorcock, Cara Hoffman, Allan Kausch, Marge Piercy, and Jonathan Lethem; those connected to Fifth Estate magazine, such as Sylvia Kasdan, Peter Werbe, Jack Bratich, and the late Peter Lamborn Wilson; writers in the Chicago Surrealist group such as Penelope Rosemont, Nancy Joyce Peters, and the late Jayne Cortez and Franklin Rosemont; or those associated with the group with which I am affiliated, the Unbearables, which includes such creators as Bonny Finberg, Yuko Otomo, Carl Watson, Wanda Phipps, Ron Kolm, Jose Padua, Kevin Riordan, and Carol Wierzbicki. These writers are working out a literature that upholds the principles of the have-nots, which include collectivism, a play with and traducing of desiccated elite symbols, tropes and rhythms, and the creating of artistic landscapes governed by the play of social movements.

JW: You wrote a collection of love poems to your wife, Nhi Chung. What was that like to write?

JF: I met Nhi in the early 1980s. For years, I had been slowly and laboriously producing poetry, but now, something new: I would be walking down the street when suddenly, a complete poem about Nhi would appear in my mind. These weren’t love poems. How could they be when we were both married to other people? However, two years after we met, we had broken up with our spouses and were living together as we are today.

Nhi, who had come as an immigrant from Southeast Asia in 1980, knew little of American culture, but I knew even less about the Chinese world. Chinese culture (or better, Cantonese culture), as far as Nhi is representative, is more sensual than American culture. It’s something I found in the deftness, precision, and fluidity of Nhi’s gestures, which appeared so graphically when she cleared away our living room furniture to practice tai chi. And it was in the music of the Cantonese language with its nine tones. To my mind, when Nhi speaks English, she has a complexity of emotional nuance in her voice that an English-only speaker like myself (without the tonal background) cannot achieve.

It wasn’t only Nhi that was so loveable; so also were aspects of Chinese culture she introduced me to. In New York City’s Chinatown in the 1980s and ’90s, there were four theaters showing Hong Kong films, which we attended almost every week. The best HK film noirs—none of which played in American cinemas—had a tartness and a view of corruption that was unflinching and invigorating. Take Arrest the Restless: A cop brings in a man who has brutally killed a prostitute. The police chief calls him to his office for a dressing down. “How dare you arrest the son of one of HK’s leading tycoons?” The killer is released, and the cop demoted. And there was a blinding originality in plotting. In Web of Deception, a woman is shot and it is thought killed. The killer doesn’t know the dead woman had a twin sister who just got out of prison and now takes on the dead woman’s role in a nail-biting masquerade.

It was the hard-nosed suspicion of authority and exuberant creativity in this HK noir that curved my writing toward crime fiction. As it was Nhi’s cosmopolitanism (evident in her speaking four languages), her questing intelligence, open-hearted generosity, and the abiding grace of her movements and conversation that has made our shared life so many-sided and adventure-tinged.

JW: Does writing come easily to you?

JF: Writing was difficult for me when I was starting out, but in the 1980s, Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press hired me to ghostwrite health and political books. Eventually I had ten under my belt, written to deadline, and I could pound out pages like the classic science fiction authors.

I was also editing. The most interesting assignment I had was helping Barney Rosset with his autobiography. Unfortunately for the speed of the project, Rosset was easily dissatisfied. After we’d spent the day painstakingly finishing a chapter, he’d get up in the middle of night and start revising, and when I came back the next day, he had thrown out all we had done. I felt like I was in The Odyssey, working for Penelope.

JW: Could you tell us about Help Yourself (Autonomedia, 2002) and Cool My Daisy (Appearances, 1998)?

JF: Help Yourself is an anthology of writings by the Unbearables literary group, which I edited with Ron Kolm and Alfred Vitale. Cool My Daisy is a tale I wrote about Rollo Whitehead, who is one of the imaginary characters, such as Tess Ventricle, Yoko Snapple, and Man Mountain McBrain, that the Unbearables created as fake, rowdy precursors.

Our group was founded in the late 1980s to battle literary stuffed shirts and engage in the type of madcap adventures recommended by one of our founders, Peter Lamborn Wilson, in his book T.A.Z. (Autonomedia, 1991). As an example of the former, we protested against the commodification of the Beats at the 1995 NYU Kerouac Conference, offering an alternative tour to the pricey one given by the college in which we promised, as Sparrow put it, ”to show you where Jack Kerouac bought his kitty litter.” As part of that protest, we held a Kerouac impersonator contest, which drew a lot of what bart plantenga called “wannabeats,” who found that to compete, they not only had to read a heartfelt poem, but also panhandle the audience in good old Beat fashion.

As to the latter, for ten years, led by Tsuarah Litzky, we did September readings with an erotic orientation on the Brooklyn Bridge, not in a bunch but spread out over the span, reading simultaneously, presenting an aural topography to passersby. In another event, this one organized by artist Shalom, rooted in the fact that we thought writers couldn’t appreciate visual art unless it was explained in words, Unbearable writers were blindfolded and led around the Whitney Museum while their artist guides described what they saw—that is, until we were booted out by security guards.

Our readings could take unusual tacks. In our séance reading, complete with a smoke machine, we channeled the spirits of dead authors. Lorraine Schein evoked Sylvia Plath while wearing a cardboard stove on her head. Tuli Kupferberg appeared as Karl Marx from beyond the grave. (The whole session can be found in Joe Maynard’s Beet Magazine, issue 9).

At our Unbearables initiation reading, we claimed aspirants, following in the footsteps of our imagined auto mechanic founder Whitehead, were stripped naked and put in a locked room with a pen, paper, a ball peen hammer, and a dented fender. At dawn, they had to emerge with a reconditioned fender and a poetic masterpiece. At the night’s high point, Sharon Mesmer stood on stage, swinging a censor and reciting the sacred syllables, “A, E, I, O, U” while initiate Jose Padua, who has since become a very moderate drinker but who that evening had a few too many, lay asleep on the stage floor. Classic Unbearables scene.

JW: Any future plans and projects, Jim?

JF: I have published two volumes of a trilogy about a literary group who get involved in solving mysteries—Neo Phobe and Long Day, Counting Tomorrow, both from Autonomedia—so I hope to do volume three. Working with new members Jason Gallagher and Gabriel Don, we revived the Brooklyn Bridge reading for one try. I wish we could do it again. Alfred Vitale caught the spirit of the event in a flyer: “Present this to any of the Unbearables reading on the bridge. Upon seeing this page, they will psychically shoot a burst of lust into your soul … you are then requested to embody that lust for the remainder of our trip across. Dance wildly around the walkway with strangers. Sing love songs to anyone … Run off the bridge streaking the parking lot at City Hall shouting, ‘I am the walrus’ or ‘Viva Las Vegas.’ Have an erotic time.”

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Interview

A Centennial Celebration: James Schuyler

by W. C. Bamberger

November 9, 2023 marked the centenary of the birth of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Schuyler. Schuyler, who died of complications from a stroke in 1991, wrote his poems in matchlessly clear language, not a single line or word straining for “poetic” effect. He also wrote novels and criticism with the same sharp observation and clarity.

Schuyler was born in Chicago, but his family moved to Washington D.C.; after his mother divorced his father and remarried, they moved to Maryland and then to the Buffalo area. Schuyler’s stepfather so disapproved of his voracious reading habit that he refused to let Schuyler have a library card. Schuyler attended Bethany College in West Virginia from 1941 to 1943. He left without earning a degree, and in later years claimed he spent all his time there playing bridge.

Schuyler served in the Navy from 1943 to 1947. He lived for a time on the Isle of Ischia in Italy where he worked as a secretary for W.H. Auden before moving to New York in 1950. By the mid-1950s, Schuyler was writing for Art News (taking Frank O’Hara’s position when O’Hara left in 1956) and working as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art.

Schuyler’s work in the art world introduced him to many prominent painters, including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter, with whom Schuyler lived from 1961 to 1972. Anne Porter once said, “Jimmy came for a visit and stayed eleven years.”^[1]

Freely Espousing, Schuyler’s first major collection, was published in 1969, when he was forty-six, and includes several poems that are among his most well-known. Schuyler was an expert gardener, an adviser to his friends on plants and flowers in regard both to gardening and poetry. This interest in part shapes his poem “Salute,” where he parallels the life experiences he hoped for with a plan he’d had to gather every type of flower in a field and study them before they wilted—a plan that never came to fruition. He resists feeling regret:

Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

Equally memorable are his beautiful threnody on the death of Frank O’Hara, “Buried at Springs,” and the poem “May 24th or So,” with its often-quoted concluding lines:

Why it seems awfully far
from the green hell of August
and the winter rictus,
dashed off, like the easiest thing

Schuyler’s other major collections include The Crystal Lithium (1972), Hymn to Life (1974), The Morning of the Poem (1980), and A Few Days (1985). Schuyler also wrote novels, including Alfred and Guinevere (1958), A Nest of Ninnies, written with John Ashbery (1969), and What’s for Dinner (1978).

Schuyler’s poems are often autobiographical in a matter-of-fact way, and yet contemplative, with very little self-absorption or self-importance. And they are often addressed to or about his friends. The title poem of his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Morning of the Poem, comprising over 14,000 words, is dedicated to painter Darragh Park. Much of the poem is addressed to a “you,” but this “you” only intermittently refers to Park: “When you read this poem you will have to decide / Which of the ‘yous’ are ‘you.'” This means that even we readers who never knew Schuyler can feel he is addressing us too.

Schuyler opens the poem with other uncertainties, about the date and even about who he is: “July 8 or July 9 the eighth surely, certainly / 1976 that I know /… I being whoever I am get out of bed.” He is staying with his mother in East Aurora, New York, but his thoughts cast a wide net. He relates memories of days in New York City, of travels, of a friend playing with his whippet; Fairfield Porter appears, other poets and artists make fleeting appearances, he longs to be back home in Chelsea, listening to Ida Cox, being sketched as he reads: “I’m posing, seated / By the tall window and the Ming tree, and look / out across the Chelsea street.” He thinks about sex; he recalls his vexing struggle to stay dry in a Paris “pissoir (I mean, a vespasienne),” but the poem includes very little that could be thought of as dramatic incident.

Schuyler suffered from depression and from manic episodes, during which he sometimes had to be restrained and hospitalized. He wrote about these experiences in his sequence “The Payne Whitney Poems,” titled after the psychiatric clinic in Manhattan. James McCourt wrote that while Schuyler “embezzled heaven,” he also “harried hell . . . the internal realm of chill and longing and dread of chaos.”^[2] All the while Schuyler was struggling to right his life, he continued to write poetry, prose, and art criticism. Wayne Koestenbaum, reviewing Schuyler’s art criticism, points out how “In a review of Fairfield Porter’s paintings, Schuyler states what might be taken as his own credo: ‘Look now. It will never be more fascinating.’”^[3]

Selected Art Writings of James Schuyler was issued in 1998, The Diary of James Schuyler in 1997, both by Black Sparrow Press. These are interesting, but even more so are the two collections of his letters: Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951–1991 (Turtle Point Press, $28), edited by William Corbett and released in a revised anniversary edition this fall, and The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara, published by Turtle Point in 2006. The letters, being addressed to someone other than himself, are livelier, juicer and more linguistically inventive than his diaristic prose.

Schuyler also wrote some diary entries specifically for a book project with Darragh Park. Schuyler had nearly stopped writing in his diary, and Park’s project proposal inspired him to begin writing diary notes again. Two Journals, published by Tibor de Nagy Editions in 1995, is a collection of jottings by Schuyler and drawings by Park done a decade earlier. The drawings are not illustrations for Schuyler’s notes, nor do Schuyler’s entries comment on the drawings. In his brief preface to the book Park explains: “James Schuyler and I decided to keep accompanying journals which would not, however, be mutually descriptive. … Much of this constituted raw material for the work of us both, often finding expression later in poems and paintings.”^[4]

After the Porters informed Schuyler that he was no longer welcome to stay in their home, he moved several times, eventually settling in the Chelsea Hotel. He continued to write through the 1980s but became increasingly reclusive as he was beset with financial and health problems. Friends did their best to keep him from becoming totally isolated; Michael Lally describes a dinner at Park’s apartment, just the two of them and Schuyler, at which “Darragh and I kept up the conversation and every now and then Darragh would defer to Jimmy, giving him a chance to offer his opinion of whatever we were talking about, but Jimmy remained silent. Until it was time for me to go, when Jimmy spoke up, graciously declaring what a wonderful dinner it had been, especially the conversation.”^[5]Schuyler’s friends had recognized what he was comfortable with and accepted him as he was.

In 1977, Z Press issued The Home Book: Prose and Poems, 1951 to 1970, edited by another of Schuyler’s artist friends, Trevor Winkfield. This book gathers up two decades of fugitive pieces; after the poems, free-form prose, and quirky short plays, the book ends with “For Joe Brainard,” a long sequence of dated diary entries. The editor chooses to close on the entry for Jan 1, 1968: Here Schuyler notes the snowy weather and then warmly describes how much he is enjoying the autobiography and letters of Charles Darwin,

a man whose concerns are on the largest and most detailed scale. He often sounds so surprised that he turned out to be him. The autobiographical part has the advantage of having been written for his family—simplicity and only the reticence of intimacy. He seems to have no scores to settle whatever. I can’t think of a book with which I would rather have begun the New Year.^[6]

Schuyler himself is just this sort of writer. I hope that many readers will take the centenary of his birth as a chance to discover or rediscover his extraordinary work.

[1] Douglas Crase, “A Voice Like the Day,” in Lines from London Terrace (Brooklyn: Pressed Wafer, 2017), 127-141, this quote p. 131.

[2] James McCourt, Queer Street (W.W. Norton: NY, 2004), 419.

[3] Wayne Koestenbaum, “Host With the Most” in ArtForum (March 1999), pp. 25, 29.

[4] James Schuyler and Darragh Park. Two Journals (New York: Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1995), 7.

[5] “Darragh Park R.I.P.,” Lally’s Alley, April 28, 2009. http://lallysalley.blogspot.com/2009/04/darragh-park-rip.html

[6] James Schuyler, The Home Book (Calais, VT: Z Press, 1977), 97.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Feature